Graduate Student, Anthropology
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Gillian Feeley-Harnik
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About
Jessica Robbins is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Her research interests include medical anthropology, aging,kinship, memory, morality, postsocialism, Poland, Central/Eastern Europe, and the EU.
Her dissertation studies the contemporary moral ambiguity of aging in Poland that is linked to memories of and visions for personal and national pasts and futures. Through an ethnographic study of older Poles’ experiences and ideals of aging in a range of institutions in Wrocław and Poznań, Poland, her research shows that the personhood of older Poles is shaped by a complex intersection of social relations, institutions, and memory. Drawing on phenomenological, political-economic, and kinship studies perspectives, this study shows how transformations in older Poles’ personhood occur through specific emplaced, gendered, and political processes, at once intimate and global. As Polish, EU, and global populations are rapidly aging and debates about retirement rage across the European continent, it is crucial to understand perspectives of the oldest generations themselves. Through investigating the moral ambiguities that characterize aging in contemporary Poland, where the elderly are key figures in national practices of remembering Poland’s past and creating the proper future path of the state and nation, this study provides a detailed, intimate, and needed perspective to this transnational phenomenon that is transforming the region.
